2012 Spring Calendar

Thursday, February 2

Susan Briante was born in Newark, N.J., after the riots. She is the author of two poetry collections, most recently Utopia Minus. She also publishes essays on industrial ruins, abandoned buildings and cultural memory. The poems in her first book, Pioneers in the Study of Motion (Ahsahta Press, Boise State University, March 2007) reference field notes as well as love letters as they trace her experiences living in Mexico City from 1992-1998 and reading the Latin American avant-garde. About Utopia Minus, the poet Jean Valentine writes, "What a wildly intelligent, learned poet Briante is, in this biography-autobiography of the American body and soul around 2010, witnessed (and lived) with such bite, understanding, and sorrow."

Free and open to the public.

Monday, March 5

4:00 pm

Anthony Doerr Craft Lecture, Eaton 209

Award-winning fiction writer Anthony Doerr will give a talk on the craft of writing: "Break the Pre- off the - Dictable: Some Thoughts on Habitualization, Cliches, Sparrow Songs, Doritos, and Writing that Puts You to Sleep."

A Writers @ Work event, sponsored by the Lilly Project

Monday, March 5

Winner of The Story Prize, the country's most prestigious award for a collection of short fiction, Anthony Doerr is the author of four books, including the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, the novel About Grace, and the story collection The Shell Collector. His most recent book, Memory Wall, a second volume of stories, was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the Boston Gobe, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Amazon.com. Doerr's short fiction has won three O.Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, the Pacific Northwest Book Award, two Ohioana Book Awards, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. He teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Free and open to the public.

Thursday, March 8

New research on Shakespearean theaters suggests that tapestries, curtains, and painted cloths were once commonly used as props. What we don't know is what images were on these hangings, or how these visual texts would have complimented onstage action. In this lecture, Professor Rebecca Olson explains that because we have treated onstage textiles as insignificant background objects, we have failed to recognize their political and phenomenological significance for some of the most famous scenes of Renaissance drama.

Rebecca Olson is Assistant Professor of English at Oregon State University. She teaches and publishes on early modern literature and culture and is completing a book called Weaving Device: The Arras and Early Modern Fiction.

Tuesday, March 13

7:00-8:30 p.m.

Lecture: American Studies & Neo Slavery Literature, Hatfield Room

"'The Lie at the Center of Everything': Reading Race in Valerie Martin's Property alongside Beloved." Dr. Christina Sharpe, Associate Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Tufts University.

Dr. Sharpe reads Valerie Martin's 2003 Orange prize-winning, neo slave-mistress novel Property in terms of the tension between what Martin has written and said about her novel (in particular about the relationship between the slave owning mistress Manon Gaudet and the enslaved woman Sarah) and its enthusiastic reception, which often seems to rely on a persistent erasure of the materiality of slavery. Sharpe considers the difficulty that continually arises for some readers in holding onto, remembering, and accounting for the very difference that Martin says she attempts to make visible, and argues that this failure to account reveals something(s) about the preformance of race (and sex and gender) in American literature and society and the continued longing to not have to account, really, for race.

Sponsored by the Dean's office for Humanities programming.

Wednesday, April 4

7:30 pm

Oregon Book Awards Author Tour, Hatfield Room

In partnership with Literary Arts, Inc., of Portland, the Hallie Ford Chair and English Department will host a reading by three finalists for this year's Oregon Book Award. The Oregon Book Awards are presented annually for the finest accomplishments by Oregon writers working in various genres, including fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction, and young adult literature. Finalists have just been announced, and we'll soon find out which of them will be visiting. Read more about the Oregon Book Awards here: http://www.literary-arts.org/awards/.

Free and open to the public

Thursday, April 12

4:00 pm

Dan Kaplan Poetry Reading, Hatfield Room

Dan Kaplan is the author of Bill's Formal Complaint (The National Poetry Review Press, 2008) and the bilingual chapbook SKIN (Red Hydra Press, 2005). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, VOLT, Denver Quarterly, the anthology Flash Fiction Forward (W.W. Norton & Co.), and elsewhere. He teaches at Portland State University and is visiting professor of creative writing at Willamette this semester.

Monday, April 30/Tuesday, May 1

TBA

New Literary Works Festival, Putnam Studio, Theatre Building

This two-evening program will celebrate the written word with a combination of dramatic readings of plays and readings of poetry and prose by students in the Department of Theatre's Atypical Performance class and the English Department's brand new Senior Seminar in Creative Writing.